Monday, 3 September 2012

Guest Review: Hirschhorn On Harlow

American poet Morgan Harlow’s debut
collection produces a compelling variant on what is called ‘experimental
poetry’. In my earlier review of Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems I noted that Bernstein defines the
term ‘difficult poem’ as one with abstruse vocabulary and syntax, hard to appreciate
on first readings, yet affecting the reader’s imagination – all of which makes “some
readers feel stupid.” Not so this collection. Although many of Harlow’s
poems do disrupt syntax, play with the geography of the poem on the page, and privilege
sound over sense, the muscular precision of the words bears down with chilling
impact on the reader. She respects her
audience. Here is the title poem in its entirety:

Davy
and Min are

burning
hooves and horns

raked
into a pile near the drive going up to the barn.

Davy
scatters a little of the ash rich in calcium

to
the chickens and Min tips a quarter turn of the shovel

onto
the ground beneath

a
belated daffodil

gotten
through the brush

where
the last sticks of firewood

left
over from the winter

splinter
and curl

in
the light of the sun.

At first glance it’s a bit of rural lyric, an
American Gothic couple fertilizing their patch. But four words, burning hooves and horns, suddenly
transport the reader into a parallel Homeric universe, behemoths roasting on
the beach, burnt offerings to the gods, ritual. Note moreover the opposition of these beasts
to a little ash, a hesitant quarter turn of the shovel, the lost
daffodil, and remnants of tinder.

Following Emily Dickinson’s directive to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --/
Success in Circuit lies,” Man Effigy
Burial Mound (a national monument in Iowa) tells of a couple driving across
one of the large 12,000 year-old American Indian mounds, the woman addressed by
a brusque male voice(“I didn’t see
until you pointed it out to me….Cut through the gut is what you said”). But they
are having an affair (“Your wife stayed home…. When we are out, your wife’s at
home”); one with a destructive ending shown by two perfect metaphors: “She
contemplates the Ice Age and the crumbling glacial loam.”

Four of Harlow’s poems draw on four paintings
by Joan Miró. One of the early surrealist painters, Miró soon developed a unique
experimental style of fantastic but discrete arrangements of colours and shapes
(called ‘pictorial signs’ by art critics). Harlow reflects on his work in Poem Beseeching an End to Social Darwinism,
a Meditation on Painting, 1933, by Joan Miró. The poem counterfactually
gives a brief straightforward prose-speech pleading for human comity: “We must
seek to understand, and not compete against, each other….Do not engage in life
as though it were a contest…”Is she
being ironic? I think not: the painting shows bright, furious reds, black and
white forms, with two humanoid shapes opposing one another, and a bemused
man-in-the-crescent moon looking down on the scene. Harlow is unafraid of
feeling or political gesture.Neither was
Miró: his Man and Woman in Front of a
Pile of Excrement, 1935 – lurid, sexual – is said to be a foreboding of the
coming Spanish Civil War. Harlow uses the work to plea again for civilized
discourse instead of violence:

That
which is elemental, the color red, amoebas, nakedness,

is
most alien to us. We must clothe it as best we can through

language,
art and law. To greet it plain is to risk stepping off

the
cliff into darkness.

Like Miró, Harlow achieves her best work with
elements: discrete, distinct and parsimonious; a muscular eccentricity. There
is a risk to writing in fragments – Harlow’s longest poem, Elegy to a Higher Love, is made of fourteen such; but to judge the
work this way would be like focusing on just one portion of an abstract
painting instead of standing back to see the whole.

I can see how the painter would illustrate
Harlow’s Park Statue:

If
the spirit of their fallen Colonel be embodied in this bronze,

must
not the infantry troops he watched over be these flowers,

each
of them keen to the whip and snap of the flag on this

perfect
summer’s day?

Summer days turn into autumn, then winter,
yet the fragile flowers still give obeisance to the obtuse statue. Note that
there are no clichéd pigeons about.

Harlow’s ars poetica in The New stands as a plea for poetry in
human life:

“…was
poetry ever not real/ distinct from the world and from love? Or/ / was it
always always lived,/ with a sigh and a breath/ and a cry?”Harlow affirms ‘always’ in this impressive first
collection.

This is a debut as well for Eyewear Publishing.The book comes in hard cover with a fine
back-sleeve photo of the poet overlaid by testimonials; the house-style front-
sleeve of this and forthcoming issues is in bold colour. One looks forward to further
collections.

Norbert Hirschhorn is a poet and physician.
His most recent collection is Monastery
of the Moon (Dar al Jadeed, Beirut, 2012). See his website: .